Author: shenazw

“1. When you tell the truth to yourself, about yourself.
2. When you tell the truth to yourself, about another.
3. When you tell the truth about yourself, to another and reveal who you are.
4. Telling the truth about another, to that other. – your truth of course, not the truth. The truth objectively doesn’t exist, but sharing your innermost truth about another, with that other.
5. When you tell the truth to everyone, about everything.
And if you can take these five steps, you’ve taken five steps closer to heaven, because heaven is not having to lie any more.”
– Neale Donald Walsch

Whoa, while I certainly haven’t mastered these, I find this a beautiful life-long practice to acquire.

One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else–closer to them than your closest family. Perhaps this person carries within them an angel–one sent to you for some higher purpose; to teach you an important lesson or to keep you safe during a perilous time. What you must do is trust in them–even if they come hand in hand with pain or suffering–the reason for their presence will become clear in due time.

Though here is a word of warning–you may grow to love this person but remember they are not yours to keep. Their purpose isn’t to save you but to show you how to save yourself. And once this is fulfilled; the halo lifts and the angel leaves their body as the person exits your life. They will be a stranger to you once more.”
Lang Leav

Heartbreak too was a blessing in disguise,
As beautiful as one,
I couldn’t have imagined for myself.
A trick by the angels,
Impelling me to find worlds,
I would not have otherwise known.

by Shenaz Wahid

I wrote these words at twenty-two when I exprerienced my first hearbreak.
There was beauty in that loss retrospectively because it cracked me open deeper to myself and my dreams.
May we find the beauty in our every wound.
May our wounds shine, in time.

“Said one oyster to a neighbouring oyster, “I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress.”
And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, “Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without.”

At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, “Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbour bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty.” Khalil Gibran

May we find the beauty in our every wound. “For He can bring beauty out of the ashes of lost dreams and glean Joy out of sorrow.”

We dance to play music with our bodies,
We dance to feel the freedom we know is rightfully ours.
We dance to surrender wounds to the strumming of guitar.
We dance to hear the song within ourselves.
We dance to give movement to the love we feel.
We dance because the earth is always singing.

For years every morning he swam back and forth across the grand river, only for the pleasure of it.
And the waters contoured his face just a little differently, like it did with rock over a million years. A curve so minute that only a man with the eyes of a falcon, could ever tell the difference.
Wildflowers grew in his hair from lying down too long under sun-splintered skies and every time he felt great love for the earth, they grew just a little more, until he carried on his head, a perpetual, interwreathed forest of wildflowers.
The children came running unto Burbo just to get a whiff of the summer meadows, even in the coldest winter.

Burbo had never noticed that he was a man unlike any other, for he thought that every man was a man unlike any other.
Until one day, Burbo’s curious feet carried him to a town, where all men were alike. They paused, until all at once they burst aloud into great laughter. Burbo wondered for the very first time, why his head carried wildflowers instead of plain good old hair.
Burbo cut his hair, the one with sun-splintered skies, rivers and wildflowers.
He sold his wildflowers for all of twenty pounds and bought a new suit with it.
Burbo donned a suit and all the men stopped laughing.

by Shenaz Wahid

Unfurling a child’s imagination, inspired by this wonderful illustration.

Devika : ” An old adage goes, ‘The good little plant can be straigthened. It can change in its youth, to grow upright, but once it grows up to be a bent tree, it cannot change.’
It will always remain the same old, bent tree.
Once it has grown and been moulded, it’s impossible for it to ever change.”

Malleka : “It is true that the bent tree cannot be a little plant again, but with the seasons that always change, it too can change. It can shed its rotten branches, the ones that do it no good. It’s a choice the bent tree has to make.
It will be nourished by the same soil and the sun that will share its light, regardless of how bent and twisted the mighty tree has grown to be. Come rain and spring, it will grow new leaves. Spring will magically return the clothes autumn had taken.
It can still blossom, to give flowers and fruit. If nothing else, it will always be able to give its cool shade, to a tired traveller.
No the mighty bent tree, won’t straighten its trunk and twisted branches, but that’s how it paints the sky with its unique beauty. That’s what makes children climb and sit in its majestically twined branches. The perfectly straight coconut tree can only be climbed by the coconut vendor.
While the forest is full of straight and tall, upright pine trees, the forest is also full of bent trees.
And the imperfect, bent tree always has a choice.”